contemporary art criticism

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There is an immense pool of talent whose voices are diminished, if not muted, because of a lack of resource and connectivity to a secluded, exclusive, and unregulated market driven by the knowledge of no artistic or learned authority but by the tastes of the generally uneducated, gambling rich.

The Latin origins of the word monster, monere/monstrum, mean to portend and instruct. A monster’s instructive function is abundant within the span of Western mythos: do not be, do, go near, or engage. Interaction with this other is a form of becoming.

The portraits created by Cayce Zavaglia are not meant to flatter. There is no idealization, only relentless recording of physiognomic traits. There is nowhere to hide from her methodical analysis of every form and tonality.

The art of Aron Wiesenfeld has a particular and peculiar relationship to the microscope. The visual field of his images, sometimes given from an ariel perspective (the all-seeing eye/the third-person omniscient), allows the removed observer to glimpse a hermetic totality vibrating with atmosphere, energy, myth, temporality, the suburban familiar, and many liminal transitions, e.g. nature and architecture, night and day, mystery and commonplace, magic and realism.

Jane LaFarge Hamill and I met when I invited her to participate in a curation project at the now liquidated Lounge Underground Artist Collective. I distinctly remember unwrapping the first of two small paintings she delivered to the space; I was taken back in the revelation of the image.

When graffiti and street art leave the urban jungle, what do they become? The elements that define the genre—spray paint drips, high-chroma colors, calligraphic lines and tagging—have become commonplace and appropriated much like the fashion world’s adoption of punk.